Surface announces MQ Retailer and New Accessory Partners for Retail

Surface has made a positive difference across a variety of industries – medical, legal, education, financial and airlines, to name a few. Similarly, businesses across the retail and hospitality sector are evolving the way they work to better serve their customers.

Tablets are being used by retailers to allow for “assisted selling” and mobile Point-Of-Sale (mPOS) solutions that help make employees’ lives easier and improve the customer experience.

Retailers need to make careful, informed choices when working to realize the benefits of assisted selling and mPOS devices. Many are realizing that force-fitting consumer devices for use in the retail setting can create unanticipated challenges requiring the purchase of additional IT tools to manage the devices, or re-building existing line-of-business (LOB) applications for the new operating systems.

Meet MQ Retail AB. A top retailer in Scandinavia, MQ has selected Surface Pro devices as a new way to deliver a broader shopping experience to customers in store. MQ had piloted several different tablet options before aligning on Surface Pro tablets. Through these pilots, they learned that their tablet initiative would work best with mobile technology designed for use in business settings, helping them bring together the back office and the storefront in new ways.

“We chose the Surface Pro because it fits perfectly into our IT environment,” shares MQ’s head of IT, Fredrick Rubne. “Using Microsoft System Center, we just plug it in and start the deployment. Windows 8.1 lets us have a controlled environment using the Assigned Access function.”

Integrating the online shopping experience within the physical stores helps MQ to grow sales with an “endless aisle” by giving customers access to the full complement of their inventory – whether it’s in the store, online or in their warehouse. Early indications show a positive impact on sales per store and offer additional supply chain and inventory management benefits. MQ will be looking to deploy the experience more broadly later this year.

New Designed for Surface partners offering mobile POS solutions

For quite some time we’ve been working with companies like AmorActive, Anthro and Incipio to create charging carts, fixed and mobile POS casings and cases. Today at NRF, we are announcing new partners who offer suites of hardware, software and gateway solutions for secure online and mobile transactions for retail.

AnywhereCommerce:The global payments technology provider announced today it has joined our Designed for Surface third party development program. Through the new joint relationship between Surface and AnywhereCommerce, retailers can take advantage of a suite of secure and flexible mobile point of sale (mPOS) solutions that are integrated into a single Surface solution for their stores.

MagTek: MagTek designs, builds and sells systems used worldwide by financial institutions, retailers, hotels, law enforcement agencies and other organizations to provide secure and efficient electronic payment and identification transactions. These include secure card readers, check scanners, payment terminals and distributed credential issuing systems. Joining the Designed for Surface program today, MagTek will work with us to develop mobile readers for EMV and magstripe cards that support the Surface tablet. MagTek’s uDynamo, BulleT, and DynaPro Mini readers (mobile) and the DynaPro and Dynamag readers (countertop) will ultimately become a part of this Surface retail solution.

We’re excited to be at NRF this week talking with retail leaders like MQ about how we can help their business. Together with these best in class retail partnerships, Surface is delivering an offering for retailers, enabling next generation POS, endless aisles, more mobile store managers, and real time gathering of info from field teams.